Comment

Interestingly, this article is in its own “More on this story” section. The only other thing there is “Study: Lax culture allowed Catholic Church scandal”.

the scandal was a temporary problem

40 years?

a permissive culture in the 1960s and 1970s that saw an increase in divorce, marijuana experimentation and robbery

Did it see an increase in child rape?

a small minority of accused priests meet the clinical definition of pedophiles

The fraction of accused who raped children wasn’t a small minority, so there must be a way to rape children without being a paedophile.

John Jay was given unprecedented access by the church — which paid for about half the study — to priests’ personnel files and psychosexual testing, as well as seminary records

Most people respond to studies which find conclusions they find surprising and which were largely funded by a group which has always advocated such a position with some degree of scepticism. Of course, such scepticism must address the question of how someone can buy the answers one wants. Failing to come up with a sensible answer is a major reason enemies of “Big Pharma” are stupid. Therefore, I want to raise a different point: the study does not appear to have any evidence other than church’s written reports. “Stuff the church has written down implies they are awesome.” Ah, right.

I haven’t read the whole report, but I looked at the contents pages to see if I could find a section in which their method and/or data sources are detailed, and I could only find data in the appendices. What I saw did not assuage my suspicions here, as all figure & table titles are suggestive of their being based entirely on what the clergy has claimed. If anyone has read a part of the report which proves me wrong on this, I would strongly encourage them to let us all know.

Who else has studied child sex abuse at this level? No other organization has anything similar. If we’re really serious about keeping kids safe, other organizations have to follow suit: the public schools, the Boy Scouts, sporting organizations

Why think everyone else is inadequate in their handling of this because they LACK the awful problems the RCC has seen? None of these organisations have had sex abuse allegations at a majority of their US branches or literally every single one of their branches in certain nations such as Belgium, whereas that is true of the RCC.

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The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.